Infosys Prize - 2011

Congratulations to my colleague, Prof. Sriram Ramaswamy, for winning this year's Infosys Prize in Physical Sciences. And it's great to see one of the two Social Sciences Prizes going to Prof. Pratap Bhanu Mehta.

Here's the Jury's citation for Sriram:

Prof. Sriram Ramaswamy's work on the mechanics and statistics of active matter has given birth and shape to this rapidly growing field. He has used simple yet powerful arguments based on symmetry and conservation principles to uncover the strange laws governing the collective behavior of active particles in a medium, which could be motor proteins walking on cytoskeletal filaments, or schools of fish swimming in an ocean and forming a pattern. He was the first to conceive of an order parameter description of living matter that was connected to stresses and strains, to elasticity, hydrodynamics and thermodynamics. The body of work by Ramaswamy and his group, starting and illuminating an area considered by many to be the most interesting recent departure in the science of soft matter, has led to a large and growing collection of theoretical predictions and their verification. It has led to significant, controlled experimentation on real biological systems as well as on relevant non-living model systems.

This page has info on all the Prize winners, including their bio, and a detailed write-up about their work.